Only $4.99 a month! Well that's worth it.

10 years later as prices slowly increase...

What is this $100 charge from Cool Tech Stuff LLC?

It's (Too) Easy to Spend Money

The digital age has brought a new form of spending; reoccurring digital products.

It's way to easy to sign up for a service and totally forget about it, then years later realize the company is still charging you. Even if you use the service every day, a few small bills can start to pile up. Thousands of dollars a year are gone to item you can't touch, you don't own and you hardly use.

Stored payment methods, small monthly charges and hard to reach billing info is a common pattern with many software companies today. If the monthly cost is just low enough, your brain will shrug when reviewing bank statements.

One of my goals for 2020 was to lower my monthly cost for reoccurring digital products. First I reviewed my bank statements to see how much each service was costing, then I weighed the value of the service to the fee. I calculated the total yearly cost against my yearly earnings. When you find a digital product is eating 1% of your yearly earnings, it helps to put the value of the product into perspective.

You Gotta Go

• Bye cutesy start-up-ish companies who I supported during their bootstrap years.
• See Ya hyper-specific digital products which only yield one or two features which I couldn't live without, but realized later I could. Their marketing worked on me...for a while.
• Nice knowing you duplicate entertainment services. Got Disney+ for the family had to say goodbye to HBO. Saved money and keeping the kid happy. Dropped FocusAtWill for work music, using free online live streams for focus music at work.
• So long early internet companies who cornered an early market with high prices. Canceled my DropBox account and synced all the content to S3. Went from $200 a year to $3.60 a year. I hadn't touched the Dropbox files in over three years.
• Farewell unused domain names for all those projects I'm totally going to do next year. Saving $16-ish dollars per failed project actually adds up.
• Au revoir overpriced hosting account. Moved all static sites to the free tier at Netlify. All my web projects are static. 🤪
  Using serverless technologies for server side logic. Not running high volume, so I once again save money.

Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.

-Benjamin Franklin

Bitcoin Pincher?

It's important to be vigilant with your purse strings. Modern day marketing makes it way to easy to click a few buttons and waste hundreds of dollars. Before you agree to terms and services and enter credit card information stop to think. Does this product make my life better? Am I wasting money on a digital pet rock?